why we should

My use of worldbuilding draws directly on its use in fiction, both in doing it in my failed attempts at SF/F novel writing, and in genre and literary criticism’s listing of examples. I cover that as an introduction in Worldbuilding 101. This building of worlds has been greatly commercialised in all movie 'franchises' since the 1970s. More recently in computer…

There is a type of social scientism which is called technocracy (and not sciencarchy I’m afraid, which is an attempt at a neologism, but I did not get there first, see references). Technocracy has been overshadowed in recent decades by the term technocrat which is a type of bureaucrat who uses some sort of mathematical based science to determine processes…

The Origins of Virtue came out 25 years ago when I was 32, and I have a dim memory of it. Dim and thin, compared to a memorable reading I had of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which I borrowed from the State Library of Tasmania’s Hobart shelves. I can visualise where it was on the shelf, on a bay…

I've been wary of 'the true self' for some time, maybe it is just a genX eyeroll at the boomers of my youth trying to 'find themselves' while also claiming to invent everything they had not learned about yet. But then they were the most modern generation, i.e. living as part of the biggest or widest demographic exploration of modernity…

First posted on substack 25 March 2023. As a librarian it is part of my calling to bring attention to readers books that they may not be aware of, but would be of interest or use to the reader. This is mostly done through the use of professional empathy, and especially allow books to find audiences who may not at…

First posted on substack in May 2023. I was ruminating about writing a post on throwing belief/s into the… —gap, and while readingWhy We Believe by Agustín Fuentes… —on the facebook group Pyrrhonism, a post came up on the book In Praise of Doubt by Peter Berger and Anton C. Zijderveld. For a moment I confused it with a title…